Checkpoint: Seinfeld Edition

I wrapped up the final episode of Seinfeld on Saturday and yet I feel there’s still more to come. I still haven’t accepted that “the show about nothing” has come to an end. How can something come to an end when there was no real story arch to speak of?

Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld kept us entertained without getting caught up with anything serious or profound. The cast of characters were wacky and the writers maintained that level of wackiness remarkably well. You’d think by the half way point, the writers would have done something drastic like give one of the characters a permanent life altering change but they always reseted back to zero.

The cast had one or two lingering partners throughout the course of the show but they often found a way to fudge it up and revert back to their default states. Even when Elaine or George found new occupations, they didn’t change. They were reacting to their new surroundings within the parameters of their characters.

I expected to be bored at one point and predict the outcome of episodes with regularity but that wasn’t the case at all. Each and every episode continued to surprise and/or entertain me in some manner until the very end.

I’ve never watched a show that was that consistent before. Even my favorite shows from HBO or AMC were never this consistent. And within the realm of sitcoms? That’s not even a fair comparison; Seinfeld stands above everything I’ve watched thus far. There were sitcoms that may have burned as hot as Seinfeld in their primes but none have managed the marathon of quality like Seinfeld did.

I loved the finale because it was a giant reset back to zero. For nine seasons, Jerry and his pals reacted and commented on others and the situations they found themselves in. In the finale, it was finally their turn. In a way they were finally getting their comeuppances. But the final scene with the four characters sitting in the jail cell was the perfect encapsulation of why I loved that show; they stayed true to themselves and continued to comment about nothing.

I want more of Larry David’s brand of entertainment so I’m going to watch Curb Your Enthusiasm next. I watched the first episode a few years back and I enjoyed it at the time without the Seinfeld frame of mind. I’m not expecting it to be Seinfeld but I am expecting Larry David’s brand of comedy.

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I decided to boot up The Last Remnant yesterday. I didn’t get very far because like with all PC games, I was spending time tweaking and optimizing. But now that I’ve enabled VSYNC, improved texture streaming and applied a bit of anti-aliasing, I’m ready to check out this Unreal Engine 3.0 powered JRPG.